Tuesday, April 9, 2013

"A
unique and innovative new observational study that did not use
temperature recordings from land stations has confirmed global land
warming, according to a scientist at NOAA's Cooperative Institute for
Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of
Colorado. The finding refutes concerns that artifacts in land-based
observing systems have led to an artificial global land warming trend.

"This shows that global warming over land is real," said CIRES scientist lead author Gilbert Compowho works at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory. "It is not an artifact of the observing system. It is happening." The scientists published their findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on April 8.

Since
1952, using a network of weather stations dotted around the globe to
take daily readings, scientists have recorded an increase of 1.2 degrees
Celsius in Earth's air temperature over land."...

(continuing): "Several scientists have,
however, questioned the accuracy and representativeness of the land
station observations that were used to determine this warming trend, and
therefore do not have confidence in it....

"Urban
warming is real, but local," Compo said. "So you need to remove the
contribution of it to try and get rid of that unrepresentative warming."

Scientists
have made corrections to the recorded temperatures to compensate for
urban warming and have also corrected several other factors that would
cause the observed data to inaccurately represent the true situation.
"The question is: Did those corrections work out?" Compo said.

To
answer this question and determine whether the observed warming trend
is real and accurate, Compo, CIRES Fellow Prashant Sardeshmukh, NOAA
scientist Jeff Whitaker and their colleagues used an entirely different
approach to investigate land surface temperature trends. The scientists
used an approach termed the 20th Century Reanalysis (20CR), a
physically based, state-of-the-art data assimilation system that
circumvents the problems faced in using weather station temperature
data.

"20CR
doesn’t have those problems because we never used a thermometer over
land to determine air temperatures over land," Compo said.

Given
the variables ofbarometric pressure, sea surface temperature, sea-ice
concentration, and carbon dioxide, volcanic and solar variations, the
scientists were able to use the 20CR to infer the air temperatures over
land across the globe. The derived temperatures agreed both annually and centennially with those found by weather stations.

"One
thing we found was that the barometer is even more valuable than we
thought," Compo said. "We were able to reproduce the hour-by-hour,
day-by-day variations in temperature using only barometric pressure as a
starting point."...

It also affirms that the
conclusions based on large-area averages of land temperatures are
robust, i.e., the climate is warming, he said."...

"The figure, from a recent report from the Congressional Research
Service (CRS), shows that despite another year of $1 trillion deficits,
the Obama administration continues to pursue its policy ofusing foreign
aid funds for anti-global warming measures– known as the Global
Climate Change Initiative (GCCI).

According to CRS, the government has spent a total of $2.5 billion on
GCCI since 2010 on overseas anti-global warming effortsin Latin
America, Asia, and Africa.

“The stalemate has led to the suggestion that global warming had stopped,” admits the Nasa.

The British Met Officeforecast even more recently that the temperature interval could continue at a high level until the end of 2017 - despite the rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions . Then global warming would pause 20 years.
How many years, this is a now common question, because the temperature
would still falter, climate scientists to rethink their forecasts of
future warming?…Scientists previously thought, fourteen years without further warming
were to bring into line with their forecasts – but not “15 years or
more,” as NASA scientists four years ago in the journal “Bulletin of the
American Meteorological Society” konstatierten . A renowned scientist wrote on 7 May 2009 in an e-mail to colleagues, as the heating pause had lasted eleven years: “The non-trend [of temperatures] would take 15 years before we need to worry about [our results].”

Dr Pachauri, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, said that open discussion about controversial science
and politically incorrect views was an essential part of tackling
climate change.

In a wide-ranging interview on topics that included this year's record northern summer Arctic ice growth, the US shale-gas revolution,
the collapse of renewable energy subsidies across Europe and the
faltering European carbon market, Dr Pachauri said no issues should be
off-limits for public discussion.

In Melbourne for a 24-hour visit to deliver a lecture for Deakin
University, Dr Pachauri said that people had the right to question the
science, whatever their motivations.

“People have to question these things and science only thrives on the basis of questioning,” Dr Pachauri said....

Unlike in Britain, there has been little publicity in Australia given
to recent acknowledgment by peak climate-science bodies in Britain and
the US of what has been a 17-year pause in global warming.Britain’s Met
Office has revised down its forecast for a global temperature rise,
predicting no further increase to 2017, which would extend the pause to
21 years.

Dr Pachauri said global average temperatures had plateaued at record levels and that the halt did not disprove global warming.

“The climate is changing because of natural factors and the impact of human actions,” Dr Pachauri said."...

================================
. News of US CO2 plunge has been described as:

"Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period
January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2
variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century
to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes
in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets: 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2
data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air
temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea
surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC
data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on
volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7)
and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month
averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data
series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature.Themaximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2
lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature,
9.5–10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to
global lower troposphere temperature. The correlation between changes in
ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 is high, but do not explain all observed changes.

Here is thebiggest shocker of all: the average American’s CO2 emissions are down to levels not seen since 1964 --over half a century ago. …Coal is the number two source of CO2 for Americans. Today the average American burns an amount similar to what they did in 1955, and even less than they did in the 1940s. …It is exactly America’s historical role of biggest and dirtiest that makes their sharp decline in CO2 pollution so noteworthy and potentiallygame changing at the global level.”...